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#solarpunk

354 posts192 participants3 posts today

Hättet ihr Lust, einen Hopepunk/Solarpunk-Buchclub zusammen zu machen?

Ich merke, es hilft mir so viel über konstruktive, positive Zukunftsvisionen zu lesen, und ich ziehe da viel Energie draus. Und es hilft mir zu lernen, was für eine Art Gesellschaft ich gerne hätte und mich zu ermutigen mich da durch kleine Gesten darauf hinzubewegen.

Would you like to make a Hopepunk/Solarpunk book club together?

I realise it helps me so much to read about constructive, positive visions of the future, and I draw a lot of energy from them. And it helps me to learn what kind of society I would like to live in and it encourages me to move towards it through small gestures.

I share this not just because it's good news, but because of the framing.

It's easy to overlook things like the introduction of legislation in all 50 states, but this is what a quietly moving revolution looks like.

Be shrewd. Move quietly & plant things. Our future is still coming.

404media.co/all-50-states-have

404 Media · All 50 States Have Now Introduced Right to Repair LegislationThe legislation hasn't yet passed everywhere, but all 50 states introducing some form of right to repair legislation is a "tipping point” for the right to repair movement.
Replied to anubis2814

@anubis2814

#Solarpunk is #communist since we **SHOULD** all be in this together.

If I generate pollution, it never just sticks with me. Its spreads and pervades everywhere, albeit thinly.

Wasteful and devastating industries are still needed HOWEVER they can be mitigated and harm reduced. And science can advance to neutralize or reverse the harmful trend.

If its new and doesn't contain most these, it might not be post-transition #solarpunk

Living densely while not feeling crowded
Hats (because no or few cars) and other traditional clothing used to reduce heating and cooling.
Interacting/engaging/working with ones local community
Lots of green space, urban gardens and food forests
Biking and mass transit
Repair, reuse, freecycling and DIY
Bulk purchasing and bulk cooking with community
People having the free time to do these things and living a good life

Replied to anubis2814

@anubis2814 Good point, but I have thought about this a lot and I have my doubts that these communities can come together in a meaningful and societal changing way without a powerful individual whose leadership shows the way. I just don't think people are wired to think on their own without seeing the leadership of an individual.

#solarpunk is the opposite of the heroes journey.
No one goes it alone it requires the collective effort, and a lot of characters to keep track of. Its a story about a community not a person, other than a point of view. There is no one hero, its a league of extraordinary nobodies.

I have what I think is a good example of how useless ‘AI’ is for understanding. I am tagging widely. I searched “how to identify mushrooms” on DuckDuckGo, which then so helpfully spammed my screen with this lovely advice (see image with alt text). The source of much of my knowledge is mushroomexpert.com, managed by Michael Kuo.

“A mushroom is identified by its characteristics”. I could get semantic here too about the definition of a mushroom, but talk about a pretty useless statement. Fine though. That’s well enough and good if you want an explanation that is super entry level. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though I don’t remember telling the ‘AI’ that I wanted only entry level information.

Then it talks about the danger in attempting to ID mushrooms because of the potential for poisoning. It tacitly assumes that my wanting to ID a mushroom means I want to eat it. I don’t. I just like mushrooms. I have a problem with the whole ‘some are poisonous’ throw-in, like its something their lawyers required them to include. How many are poisonous? 90%? 5%? We have no idea, and that’s OK. I didn’t tell the ‘AI’ that I wanted information on whether or not they were poisonous. But, as I’ll get to, the fact that this is included is not my problem. My problem is what they don’t include.

I think mushrooms are awesome. I think the fact that some of them are poisonous is relevant only based on the human-centric assumptions ‘AI’ is so obsessed with and what it’s dataset is built on. I don’t see the value in a mushroom based on whether or not I can eat it, and it chaffs me that they don’t also include any information about their ecological roles. You know what is a great way to identify a mushroom (including if I want to eat it)?!?!?! Their ecology (essentially, their ‘behavior’)!!! Let’s be sure to not mention that, #TechBros.

Ok let’s keep going, cause we’ve made it this far. It suggests talking to a #mycologist. It turns out that I don’t have any experienced mycologists on call. Mycologists are helpful but busy people. And I’m more likely than most of the population to know mycologists. You might as well say, ‘don’t bother trying to ID the mushroom’. Way to kill my interest immediately in something I’m trying to get into. If you really want to learn to ID mushrooms for foraging, there are sources you can look up to help you.

I’ll get to my main point. Identification of certain mushroom forming fungi to species is essentially impossible. Look up Amanitas or Russulas on mushroomexpert.com (phenomenal source, old school blogging). There is no clear delineating of what a mushroom forming species even is. Scientists argue over and reclassify bird subspecies all the time. Imagine the black box that is mushroom forming fungi, which most of the time is a web of single-cell wide threads hidden in the soil. Some mushrooms historically were ‘IDed’ (scientifically) by taste or color, which as you all know everyone experiences these things the same, all the time. And, darnit, I happened to leave my DNA sequencing kit at home (as if there aren’t issues with classifying mushroom forming fungi on their DNA alone).

If ‘AI’ were functional, to me, it would include the suggestion that one option is, instead of focusing on species, focus on species groupings (this also applies to foraging for mushrooms if done thoughtfully). Species groupings can be more useful, as is sometimes saying: “I don’t need to know exactly what this is. I’ll just focus on it’s ecology instead of obsessing over an arbitrary definition”. This nuance is not something that can be corrected with better algorithms or more training data (in fact, its going to get worse), because #LLM s are designed to spit out the lowest common denominator.

In the end, given all the questions I brought up, the biggest problems I have with ‘AI’ is that it falsely assumes something gigantic about the question I am asking and gives a simplified and highly misleading perception of how much we actually know. I think it makes a big mistake assuming that I am uncurious and want a bare-minimum answer. And when it comes to the grand total of all there is to know about mushroom forming fungi, we know next to nothing. Of course, 'AI' cannot say that because 'AI' doesn't know what it doesn't know.

You know who can identify and communicate all of these nuances? Humans.

Replied in thread

@wildflower haha YES! (I'm laughing because I write these stories *and* run a podcast collecting up a list of hopeful climate fiction)

My stuff: susankayequinn.com/

Bright Green Futures — a podcast/substack but also lists of hopeful climate fiction, related non-fiction, and now even some academic studies: brightgreenfutures.substack.co

One of my stories I wish everyone would read (free, online): reckoning.press/its-in-the-blo

SUSAN KAYE QUINNSUSAN KAYE QUINNauthor of speculative fiction.

7.2: Ariel & Christina Discuss: Why Must Utopia Be Cruel?

In this episode, Ariel and Christina try to get to the bottom of why our fictional visions of utopia are so negative. They often involve mindless acquiescence to an authoritarian nanny state, the oppression and labor of an underclass, or both. It’s as if we can’t imagine a situation in which we all voluntarily treat each other (reasonably) decently and life can be good for everyone. We discuss the literary origins of utopia, how it has evolved (or not) as a concept, and Ariel gives a few examples of sci-fi futures that are about as close to her style of solarpunk utopia as can be. Ultimately, the topic of utopia raises more questions than answers.

youtu.be/WR8yg2cOcMk?si=AwMMgH

#solarpunk #SolarpunkPresentsPodcast #Season7 #Episode #PodcastEpisode #YouTube #utopia #SirThomasMore #SaintThomasMore #ThomasMore #Dystopia #Protopia #WakandaForever #BlackPanther #Indigenous Futurisms #Afrofuturism #Utopias #Anti-Utopia #LiteraryHistory #Cruelty #Despair #Hope #UntopiaParadox #Omelas #TheOnesWhoStayAndFight #TheOnesWhoWalkAwayFromOmelas

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